Gill Kendon International Study and Language Institute Building a corpus of pre-sessional student essays: practicalities and benefits Gill Kendon International Study and Language Institute

Setting it up - Challenges Time Selecting corpus tool Selecting essays permissions preparing http://www.sketchengine.co.uk Shell script student data

Categorisation Attribute Values Task Language1 Study level Attainment E1 Alternative sources of Energy E2 Commercial influences on Science E3 Global food supplies P1 Sustainable development Project2 E4 Aging population Language1 Thai Chinese Arabic Kazahk OtherSlavic Romance (Incl Spanish, Italian, etc) Germanic (Incl German, Scadanavian languages) OtherAsian Other Study level PG UG Attainment High (final grade of 6.5 +) Medium Low (final grade 5 or below) Course Summer pre-sessional 2013   Student code

Selecting subsections

Using the corpus Supplementary worksheets Checking on guided self-study Errors from a particular group e.g. Using personal style In my opinion there are some ways to improve the situation The third method I can think up is recycling waste Simple search for ‘I’ , ‘my’ etc Sentence view vs KWIC view Error correction task

Use: Online learning Online learning objects Xerte Toolkit Examples of errors Use corpus to identify types of error e.g. such as clause in the wrong place complete list too many examples including a second ‘example marker’ (etc., and so on,…) http://www.xerte.org.uk

Use: positive examples Critique real life examples Realistic models Finding good examples Essay on threats to global food supplies. select higher scoring students and later essay added <p> tag at preparation stage to identify paragraph boundaries <p><s/>

Paragraph leaders Doc#205 <p> Topic: There are many threats to global food supplies. <p> One of the important factors for driving the world is food. <p> As a result of a population explosion and climate change, there are two main problems with global food supplies. <p> There are two main solutions to limit the threats to global food supplies. <p> Although the solutions can increase the food production and deal with climate change issues, there are some conditions to these solutions. <p> In conclusion, the population explosion and climate change are the cause of shortage food and ecosystem issues.

Use: vocabulary Compare use of effect in pre-sessional corpus with that in BAWE

Reflections Was it worthwhile? YES Collecting the essays Turnitin earlier draft – richer source of errors later drafts for good examples Categorisation? time consuming attractive idea, but… Smaller collections single group – own errors